The Black Mountain College (BMC) in North Carolina was the leading institution for interdisciplinary arts education in the late 1940s. The curriculum included not only the fine arts, architecture and theatre, but also economics, physics and history. Many of America’s foremost artists, poets and designers of the time, as well as numerous emigrants from Germany who came to the Black Mountain College from the Bauhaus after it was closed by the Nazis, were among the teaching staff. The goal of the BMC was to establish a democratic and – in accordance with John Dewey’s principles of progressive education – experience-based, interdisciplinary teaching institute. This publication is the first to examine the BMC’s educational model, its philosophical approaches and John Dewey’s philosophy of art, with the aim of comprehensively understanding and reviving the BMC’s legacy in order to renew it in a participatory sense. A major focus of this volume is the art project PERFORMING the Black Mountain ARCHIVE by Arnold Dreyblatt, in which students from European art academies were invited to translate an archive on the Black Mountain College created by Dreyblatt into the present time through performative interaction. Text in English and German.

This groundbreaking collection from scholars and artists on the legacy of Beckett in contemporary art provides readers with a unique view of this important writer for page, stage, and screen. The volume argues that Beckett is more than an influence on contemporary arthe is, in fact, a contemporary artist, working alongside artists across disciplines in the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond. The volume explores Becketts formal experiments in drama, prose, and other media as contemporary, parallel revisions of modernisms theoretical presuppositions congruent with trends like Minimalism and Conceptual Art. Containing interviews with and pieces by working artists, alongside contributions of scholars of literature and the visual arts, this collection offers an essential reassessment of Becketts work. Perceiving Becketts ongoing importance from the perspective of contemporary art practices, dominated by installation and conceptual strategies, it offers a completely new frame through which to read perennial Beckettian themes of impotence, failure, and penury. From Becketts remains, as it were, contemporary artists find endless inspiration.

The New York-born artist deals with our conception of a complex world increasingly dominated by mass media.

Asking the question, if human perception and memory can live up to the information offered, his video art plays games with our curiosity and will to decipher the unknown. Our limits of apprehension are being tested, for example, by keeping the pace of displayed words and images constantly too fast, so that the attempt to make sense of a flood of information is bound to fail.